Current Results of a Field Study of Adult Users of Tactile Aids

Abstract

Current results of an evaluation of the speech reception of deaf adults who are making use of tactile aids for substantial periods of time in the field are described. Eight deaf adults were provided with a wearable multichannel tactile aid that they were asked to wear routinely in their everyday lives. These subjects, who did not receive any specific training in the use of the tactile aid, participated in periodic laboratory evaluations of their speech-reception performance with the aids and also provided responses to a communication-profile survey. The laboratory results reported here were concerned primarily with assessing speechreading ability with and without tactile aids for several types of connected-speech materials and tasks. The relative gain (difference between aided and unaided speechreading scores normalized by the maximum possible improvement) observed for the reception of words in isolated sentences averaged roughly 25%, with a range of 0-65% across subjects, and showed a tendency to increase with the speechreading-alone score. Small improvements, averaging six words/minute and ranging from −2 to 10 words/minute across subjects , were observed for connected-discourse tracking when tactile aids were used to supplement speechreading compared to speechreading alone. A comparison of performance for tactile aids, cochlear implants, and hearing aids is presented for aided speechreading of sentence materials.